Summary

In Israel and Palestine, more than an entire generation has been raised knowing nothing else but a perpetual state of war with the other. The conflict contains two completely different narratives, narratives of victimization, oppression and hate. Each side can understand itself to be the victim of history, and exactly those zero-sum notions of victimhood are the critical part of the intractability problem within the conflict (see for instance Cohen 2005: 343 ff.). Due to its importance for Middle-East peace and stability in the region, there is the need to further investigate the miscellaneous causes of this intractability. Concerning this matter, the challenges faced by media in covering the Israeli-Palestinian story were recently examined at the annual United Nations International Seminar on Peace in the Middle East held in May 2015. Although the role of media and discourse in the midst of conflict was only a minor topic, the role of (international) media – especially the distortion of facts – has been a question of matter for long (see for instance Behrens 2003; McMahon 2010, 2011; Baden 2014; Ozohu-Suleiman/Ishak 2014). This paper shares the assumption that those media representations contribute their part to the ongoing rivalries at the base of both people, which hinders reconciliation and therefore contributes to the intractability of the conflict. It wants to affiliate with the question of the role of local media representation in terms of the perception of harm each side causes the other and thereby integrate itself into the scientific discourse on the conflict. The following research question will be investigated: Why do both conflict parties see the other side as bad other instead of suffering neighbor?! [...]